6 comments:

Nice into to sputtering. Through my experience I have found that 80% of the energy supplied by the power supply ends up as heat in the target. This is why the cooling water specification for our rotary magnetrons, www.sputteringcomponents.com, is 1 liter per minute per kilowatt of energy that we put into the target material. Also I would recommend using an Advanced Energy MDX 500 power supply for your DC sputtering process. The MDX is usually easy to find on E-bay and it is pretty indestructible if your target starts arcing. Keep up the good work!

- Is this a water cooled quarz thickness monitor? Did you discard your decapitated quarz oscillator?- There are only a few polymers that are suitable for vacuum use. The only one to come by easily is Teflon, but temerature is a problem for it. - I'm not very much into sputtering oxides, but a little addition of oxygen to the sputter gas might be helpful to get the right stoichiometry on your substrate. A least for PLD processes this is necessary. There, heating the substrate is also very important.

Michael, thanks. I gave up on the decapitated crystal oscillators after someone donated a quartz crystal holder. It's true that 1-2% O2 is often added for ITO sputtering, but I don't have any fancy flow control devices. I might try to rig up a needle valve manifold.

yes needle valves should do the job. If you ever can get your hands on some mass flow controllers don`t worry about their calibration. Normally hey can be recalibrated to other gases.MFCs are neat devices but quite expensive.Michael